Perseus Academic: A Catalogue of Everything in the World by Yelizaveta Renfro

These linked short stories, all set in Nebraska, feature a range of characters: a bus driver mourning the death of his infant, an octogenarian preparing for death, a girl trying to cope with her parents' divorce, and a woman whose obsession with a decades-old crime has taken over her life.

Yelizaveta P. Renfro: Yelizaveta P. Renfro was born in the former Soviet Union to a Russian mother and American father, and previously lived in Russia, California, and Virginia. Her short story collection, A Catalogue of Everything in the World, the 2008 St. Lawrence Book Award winner, is set in and inspired by the American Midwest. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Glimmer Train Stories, North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Witness, Blue Mesa Review, So to Speak, the anthology A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection (University of Illinois Press/OV Books, 2008), and elsewhere. Her awards include Glimmer Train Fiction Open second place, So to Speak Fiction Contest first place, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award, and a Pushcart Prize nomination. She earned a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of California and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from George Mason University. She is completing her Ph.D. in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.